A federal jury awarded two female Central Bucks teachers $160,000 in equal pay verdict

Two female teachers who say Central Bucks underpaid them compared with men won $160,000 in a federal jury verdict Thursday.

The verdict — which awarded $81,000 to Rebecca Cartee-Haring and $84,000 to Dawn Marinello — was handed down in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, after a trial that began Monday.

The amounts were less than the women said they were owed by the district in back pay compared with where they believed they should have been placed on its salary scale. Cartee-Haring said she was owed $256,000 over 17 years in the district and Marinello, $387,399 over nine years.

But a lawyer for the plaintiffs said the decision reflected a finding that the district discriminated against the two women, both English teachers who said male teachers had been paid substantially more without justification.

“This proves that the district has disrespected its women teachers,” said the lawyer, Ed Mazurek. “The question is, whether the district is going to continue?”

Central Bucks officials said they planned to appeal the decision.

“While the district is encouraged that the jury found no evidence of willful misconduct, the evidence the district presented does not support any award to the plaintiffs,” eight of the district’s school board members said in a message to the community Thursday. (The ninth board member, Rick Haring, is married to Cartee-Haring and was not among the signers.)

The board members — who described the jury awards as a “compromise verdict” — said they “maintain that employee compensation was set lawfully and fairly, based on legitimate, nondiscriminatory factors, and are committed to ensuring all employees are treated equitably and in accordance with the law.”

The equal pay dispute in Central Bucks has been underway for years; an earlier case on behalf of more than 300 female teachers suing the district ended with a hung jury last year.

After that mistrial, U.S. District Court Judge Michael Baylson in August decertified the case’s collective-action status, requiring teachers who still wanted to pursue claims against the district to file lawsuits on their own.

More than 120 female teachers then sued again earlier this year; after Baylson ruled that they would have to sue individually, Mazurek appealed to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. That appeal is pending, Mazurek said Thursday.

In the case decided Thursday — which was originally filed in 2020 — Baylson required Cartee-Haring and Marinello to identify specific male teachers as comparisons, rather than comparing themselves with any male teacher in the district.

The district argued that the male teachers they selected didn’t perform equivalent work, because the men were social studies teachers, and one was also hired and compensated for his additional role as a football coach. (That teacher was hired at a starting salary of $101,000 in 2010, compared with Cartee-Haring’s $54,000 in 2007 and Marinello’s $51,000 in 2016.)

Central Bucks also accused the women of “cherry-picking” the highest-paid comparison.

Mazurek said the district’s argument about the football coach wasn’t valid because Central Bucks has a separate scale to award extra money to coaches, rather than incorporating pay into teaching salaries.

He added that the coach, along with other male teachers, “deserves every single cent he was paid. This case is about the fact that my clients deserve to be paid that too as women.”

Cartee-Haring — who had alleged in another lawsuit that Central Bucks discriminated against her in removing her as girls’ lacrosse coach — resigned from the district last year after failing to reach a settlement on behalf of women in the collective action pay case.

She said Thursday that the verdict was “validation for all of the women working in Central Bucks and our male colleagues that know we all contributed equally and deserve to be paid the same.” For the district and school board, she said, “it’s time to do the right thing.”